In a conversation-style talk at tables set for an intimate lunch, Mohamud told EMU leaders: “I’d like to officially request your help for Somalia with the tools and techniques you have here, which are very life-saving tools – not [only] life-saving at the individual level, but life-saving at a nation level.”

He commended CJP’s , which has 16 Somali-speaking women as graduates or current students: “You educate a woman, you educate a family. You educate a family, you educate a whole nation.”

He added that another important group to nurture as peacebuilders is the youth of his country, who constitute the largest segment of its population and who have spent much of their lives experiencing violence and displacement. “All of their lives [have been] unstable for a long time. They keep running, one place after another.”

The young of Somalia need trauma healing, education, and work opportunities in order not to be vulnerable to recruiting by terrorist organizations, he said.

CJP program director concurred with Mohamud’s observation, saying: “We don’t want to create a society where young men are drawn into violence because they have no prospects for a positive life, while young women are taught to be peacemakers.”

EMU’s commitment to Somali region

Docherty touched on EMU’s “long commitment to the Somali region.” She spoke of celebrating the graduation of CJP’s first cohort of Somali women in the peacebuilding leadership program in December 2013. There she felt “great hope,” but also heard the women express “the need to connect large-scale work on trauma healing with any initiatives to rebuild the country.”

Mohamud arrived in Harrisonburg in a mid-sized black car sandwiched between two other black vehicles, with accompanying members of the U.S. Secret Service.

“We are always honored when our former students return to campus, [but] to my knowledge, you are the first alumnus to return with a motorcade,” said CJP executive director in his welcoming remarks, evoking a warm smile from the Somali president.

How this president came to know EMU

CJP’s direct connections to Somalia include alumna Khadija Ossoble Ali, who earned her in 2001. Ali then became a member of Somalia’s parliament and served in the prime minister’s cabinet. She left Somalia in the mid-2000s due to political changes and began pursuing a PhD at in Virginia. With her doctorate just completed, she recently met with Mohamud in Somalia where they spoke of new responsibilities for her. (The president conveyed her personal greetings to EMU.)

After Ali began studying at CJP in the late 1990s, she recommended EMU’s Summer Peacebuilding Institute (SPI) to Mohamud, who was then an educational leader in Somalia. (He is the founder of what has evolved into in Mogadishu, with 5,000 students.) Mohamud took three of SPI’s intensive courses in 2001, focusing on mediation, trauma healing, and how to design learner-centered trainings.

“My brothers and sisters,” he said, recalling his time at SPI, “this is another great day in coming back here after more than 10 years away.” Since Mohamud’s time at SPI, more than a dozen Somali men and women have attended SPI, plus many others who have Somali roots but enroll in SPI from Kenyan, U.S., or other addresses (SPI does not track its participants by ethnicity).

“After I left here,” Mohamud recounted, “I extensively traveled in Somalia, mediating [between] different communities and clans [which] were having conflicts for different reasons.”

Understandings, patience, helped by SPI teachings

“The tools and the instruments that I took from here helped me a lot in sitting with the people, having the patience and the endurance to listen to sometimes irrational arguments,” he said.

Fortunately, Mohamud said, his SPI training helped him to realize that the people speaking irrationally and often choosing destructive paths were burdened by psychosocial traumatic baggage as a result of their constant exposure to violent conflict.

Unfortunately, he added, Somalia remains a tinderbox. A destructive act by even one person can undermine years of efforts at peacebuilding and reconciliation and spark widespread attacks of one group against another.

Threatened by terrorists

In this environment – with Somalia’s still-weak, distrusted governmental bodies – the terrorist group Al-Shabaab has played a viciously destabilizing role in Somalia and indeed the entire region, Mohamud said. Members of this group tried to kill Mohamud in a hotel assault four days after he became president on Sept. 10, 2012, and have launched other attacks on him over the last two years, sometimes killing people around him.

On a positive note, Mohamud said Somalia is a “very, very rich country” in terms of possibilities for its people to thrive once stability is achieved. It has millions of hectares of arable land, two strongly flowing rivers, the longest coastline in Africa, and the most livestock per capita. He pointed out that Somalia is situated at one of the “most strategic locations in the world.”

The meeting was held in an area that could be easily secured by the Secret Service and local police. Twenty-six representatives of EMU joined Mohamud and his accompanying group of eight for remarks and lunch at , a relatively secluded meeting area on the back side of Common Good Marketplace, near the southeast corner of EMU’s campus.

Mohamud singled out , a rising junior at EMU, for special attention at the luncheon, giving her a warm hug as he departed. He praised her deceased mother, , a Somali-Muslim renowned for her peace work in East Africa, for insisting that the “cross-cutting subject” of peacebuilding be woven through the required coursework of all students at Simad University.

Fruits of interfaith work

As one of three who spoke on behalf of EMU, Byler explicitly referred to the interfaith nature of EMU’s work with Somali-speaking people, who are largely Muslim.

Byler quoted two passages from the Holy Quran that “whoever saves a life, it is as though he had saved the lives of all humankind.” And: “Have you seen him who denies the religion? He is the one who harshly rebuffs the orphan and does not urge the feeding of the poor.” Byler offered Psalm 82:3 as having a similar message for Jews and Christians: “Give justice to the weak and the orphan; maintain the right of the lowly and destitute.” The Somali president nodded in affirmation as Byler spoke these words.

As a sign of CJP’s commitment to Somalia and the rest of the Horn of Africa, Byler said CJP is establishing its first “practice and learning hub” to “partner with and support our [East African] alumni as they engage in this challenging work” of addressing the deeply rooted, systemic problems that feed the cycles of violence.

EMU President presented the president of Somalia with several gifts, including training materials in the Somali language used by EMU’s program.

Her experience reflects the new ways and new places that education takes place these days for EMU students, including , , grant-funded research and practicums, and being part of a cohort at a site to which EMU faculty come for classes.

Enns, from Winnipeg, Canada, lived in the nation’s capital at . While taking two courses at the center, she worked at , an interfaith coalition that seeks to end anti-Muslim sentiment in the U.S. As an intern with the organization, she used her experience as co-editor of , EMU’s student newspaper, to produce a bi-weekly newsletter, compile fact sheets, and otherwise pitch in on the group’s various initiatives.

An internship through EMU’s Washington center is more than just a taste of real-world work and an opportunity to develop contacts, ideas, and credentials for life after college. It’s also a launching point for deeper examination of the relationship between faith, values, and career.

“How do we as Mennonites engage the state, and how much do we build our alternative systems?” asked Enns, whose great-grandparents were part of the mass migration of Mennonites from Russia to North America during the turbulent years after the Bolshevik Revolution.

What relationship, exactly, should a person of faith hold toward advocacy in a secular environment, she wonders. Doesn’t faith like hers, one that prescribes action on behalf of “the least among us,” require this sort of entanglement with the wider world? But does this very entanglement with the wider world undermine the foundations of her faith?

Enns doesn’t have answers to her questions yet, but she knows she would like to continue doing faith-based advocacy after she graduates this spring. In fact, her plans at this point are to join .

During her four-year career at EMU, Enns took advantage of other non-traditional ways of learning.

Soon after she arrived on campus as a first-year student, she took an optional field trip with her Restorative Justice and Trauma class to a penitentiary, where she participated in three days of a Quaker-developed “Alternatives to Violence Program” with inmates.

In her sophomore year, Enns satisfied EMU’s cross-cultural requirement by creating her own semester-long study experience in the African nation of Chad, where her parents were serving with .

For 10 weeks between her junior and senior years, Enns was part of a offered at EMU that gives college students a chance to be an intern, mentored by a pastor, in a congregational  setting. Her assignment was at .

EMU offers a variety of other new ways and places for students to pursue their education.

More and more graduate students are taking their courses online, usually studying from their homes. The was the first unit at EMU to offer distance learning, and now most of EMU’s also offer courses online.

Nurses who are studying for a master’s degree in nursing leadership and management don’t have to come to campus very often (or to .).  The program is designed for working nurses who need to maintain family commitments and remain on the job. Jeanette Nisly ’96, for example, is and raising two children with her Guatemalan husband.

Sometimes the students are surprised to see that online learning actually offers more interaction with class members and professors than a traditional classroom. A faculty advisor provides ongoing support for students and helps with logistics, technology questions, and other issues. Students also receive support from staff, graduate writing tutors, and library staff.

Other non-traditional learning opportunities at EMU:

• , which offers a mix of study through the annual Summer Peacebuilding Institute at EMU and experiences in the students’ home countries. The first group, in 2012, included 12 women from Africa and the South Pacific. They were selected from more than 100 applications. Funds for the program are provided by USAID and the German development organization, EED/Bread for the World.

• . The latest example, announced in February, is a $20,000 grant from the United Service Foundation that will send eight undergraduates to foreign locations (Colombia and Iran in 2013), supervised by an EMU-linked mentor. The grants are for peacebuilding and development majors, who are required to complete off-campus practicums.

• . Many of the students enrolled in EMU’s programs run from Lancaster, Pa., don’t actually go to classes at the center’s facility in a business park. Students in the pastoral studies program, for example, attend classes this spring at Lancaster Mennonite Conference offices or sites in Philadelphia, Hatfield, and Morgantown. The three-year program, called , is for new pastors or prospective pastors.

• Taking trauma courses all over the world. In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, established a program to help community leaders deal with the trauma of disasters and conflict. Called , the program has trained more than 7,000 people worldwide. The training seminars take place at EMU, across the United States, and all over the world in places like Lebanon, Haiti, and Mexico.

The United States government denied entry to the six (two each from Kenya, Somalia and Somaliland). This was ironic, given that a federal agency, , was paying for their training.

The stated reason for exclusion was that the women might overstay their visas, says Jenner. That allegation “was more upsetting to them than that they were denied visas,” adds Jenner, who found all six women “completely committed to their countries.”

The women, ages mid-20s to early 40s, included peacebuilding-organization workers, an educational journalist, and a trauma-healing counselor. Some had been war refugees as children – a history belying the ebullient smiles in photos showing them with their American instructors, all wearing Somali clothing.

All participants in this program need a university degree before they can be admitted to WPLP [Women’s Peace Leadership Program], something not easy to obtain for many Somali women. Thus, says Jenner, these women needed to be very determined and passionate about getting an education despite often-difficult circumstances.

Jenner, Rhodes and Docherty devoted two weeks in September and October ¬– amid a busy semester on EMU’s Harrisonburg, Va., campus – to teach the women in Hargeisa, Somaliland’s capital. Commercial flights to Hargeisa from Nairobi had just been discontinued, limiting the EMU teachers to “lowest priority” seating on United Nations flights.

Docherty explains that WPLP is designed to create a network of women peace leaders within a specific country or region, who can “relate to

one another as ‘lost sisters from the same clan,’” while helping transform their region’s conflicts.

The first stage of the women’s program – initially conducted for 12 other women at in May and June – consisted of two six-day courses. In “Conflict Analysis,” taught by Rhodes, the women in Hargeisa acquired tools for understanding problems. “Strategic Peacebuilding,” taught by Docherty, helped them plan interventions.

They’re now finishing activities and papers begun during course sessions. Those completing the 15 credit-hour program will receive graduate certificates.

“It is a privilege to interact with and teach women who have been brought up during a time of civil war,” says Rhodes. “I’m learning a great deal about what gives these women motivation for peacebuilding and about how wise, strong and resilient they are.”

Rhodes felt buoyed by the women’s hopefulness. They had “hope for security and stability, hope for more women’s participation in decision making, and hope for a peaceful Somaliland and Somalia in the future.”

Somaliland is a self-declared, but internationally unrecognized, state that broke off from northern Somalia to form its own parliamentary government in 1991. It enjoys more stability than war-torn Somalia, which has struggled to establish a functioning government (though Jenner says the WPLP women consider its new president, who has himself attended SPI, to be promising). Since earlier visits, Jenner has seen former refugees returning to Somaliland, and the building of shopping centers and high-rises, though extreme economic disparities remain.

Jenner says the six were “such fun women,” yet deeply committed. Even within a patriarchal culture, “They can be spokespeople for the women who don’t have the ability to speak for themselves.”

In Somali culture, she adds, “In theory, women have quite limited power. In practice, it’s like any society” – widely varied. Women, for example, often resolve family disputes.

The 12 program participants on campus in mid-2012 came from Liberia, the South Pacific and Somalia. Before her death in a 2011 accident, former SPI student and teacher Dekha Ibrahim Abdi had advocated for a women’s program, while master’s degree alumna and served as a major inspiration.

The program is expected to grow gradually, says Jenner, depending upon the ability of regional women’s networks, or cohorts, to build local organizational support and secure sources of funding.